Tag Archives: Flatpak

GUADEC 2017 has ended in Manchester. It’s been great; thanks to the organisers and sponsors for a fun conference (this year’s highlight: a preponderance of Tiki bars).

We’ve had sun and heat, and we’ve had rain and more rain. Often within the same hour. On the final day of the conference, a group of us went out to Edale to do some walks to see the Peak District, a national park area near Manchester. This is an area I’ve visited many times before, so it was fun to be able to show it to GNOME people.

This year I gave a talk about the Coverity scans I’ve been running on various GNOME and freedesktop modules for the last year. The slides are online and the video will be up with the rest of the GUADEC videos. If you have a security-critical (or other) module which you’d like to be included in the scan set, let me know. Coverity’s good at finding bugs in complex control flows, but you do need to put some time into triaging its reports. I’m happy to provide guidance about using it.

I spent a fair amount of time during the unconference days reviewing Simon McVittie’s D-Bus work to add support for app-containers into the D-Bus specification and dbus-daemon. This is the first part of an effort to improve support for exposing unconfined D-Bus services to confined app-containers safely and efficiently. The rest of my time was spent working on exciting support for updating flatpak over the LAN for Endless OS. I’ll blog about this more in future.

Thanks to the GUADEC team for organising a great conference, the conference sponsors, and to my employer, Endless, for sponsoring me to go.

Speaking of Hitori, I don’t have much time to maintain it at the moment, and there are some interestingopenfeature requests. If anybody is looking for a fun little project to take on, I am happy to mentor work on them.

Worked out an approach for versioning GTK+ in future, to improve the balance between stability and speed of development. This has turned into a wiki page.

I demoed Dunfell and added support for visualising GTasks to it. I don’t know how much time I will have for it in the near future, so help and feedback are welcome.

There was a detailed discussion of portals for Flatpak, including lots of use cases, and the basics of a security design were decided which allows the most code reuse while also separating functionality. Simon has written more about this.

I missed some of the architectural discussion about the future of GTK+ (including moving some classes around, merging some things and stripping out some outdated things), but I believe Benjamin had useful discussions with people about it.